Peace activists say they aren't being derailed by polls showing their support fading, or by televised images of cheering Iraqis greeting invading U. S. soldiers and dragging the severed head of a Saddam Hussein statue through Baghdad.

Instead, they're altering their message: They still want the U.S. military to pull out of Iraq, but now they're calling for the United Nations or a neutral third party to handle Iraq's transition to a democracy.

"Iraqis are understandably happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein," said Andrea Buffa, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of more than 200 religious, labor and community groups. "But that doesn't mean they want U.S. soldiers to be occupying their country."

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Yet at home, the peace movement faces its own mortality in a single question: Will the energy that brought hundreds of thousands of people to Bay Area demonstrations over the past six months fade in the afterglow of a U.S. military victory?

Over the next several weeks, movement leaders will huddle to figure out their next step. In raw numbers, several barometers of the movement's strength can be read over the next few days.

Anti-war organizers are hoping for tens of thousands of people to meet at noon Saturday in San Francisco's Civic Center and begin marching to Dolores Park at 1:30 p.m. for a rally.

Activists also expect hundreds more to participate in civil disobedience at 6 a.m. Monday at Chevron's headquarters in San Ramon, an effort to link the U. S. war in Iraq to the nation's dependence on oil.

Other protests and gestures are still in the works to try to keep the movement from disappearing with the occupation of Baghdad. These include an effort Saturday by dozens of Bay Area yoga studios to offer free classes in exchange for a donation toward Iraqi war victims; a "Global War Drive" teach- in the following Saturday at Horace Mann Middle School in San Francisco's Mission District; and a 24-hour-a-day vigil at the Federal Building in the city.

However, organizers acknowledge that the anti-war effort must evolve to survive, given the changed situation in Iraq.

Dillon spent much of Tuesday night with his friend Harry Belafonte, the entertainer, U.N. goodwill ambassador and veteran of many international movements.

Earlier this week, Belafonte received a several-minutes-long standing ovation after his speech on social justice and its connection to the war to a national convention of school board members meeting in San Francisco.

Dillon took that as a sign that while the polls show that Americans are in a wartime support-the-troops mode, people are also receptive to the economic messages that the movement touched on, particularly in recent weeks.

Many activists think they struck a chord when they argued that the $78 billion that President Bush requested from Congress to cover the initial costs of the war could be better used for health care and education. Last week, that theme pervaded an anti-war demonstration in Oakland, which organizers and observers said drew a greater proportion of people of color than other marches.

Given the desire to back the troops during war, Dillon said he wasn't surprised by a Field Poll released this week showing only a slim majority of support for anti-war protests -- even in the movement's ideological soul in the Bay Area. Other activists, however, acknowledge privately that the movement has lost numbers in recent weeks, and worry that Americans don't see it as relevant with the Pentagon apparently about to win a war that is popular in the United States.

For now, activists will try to keep their faithful zeroed in on a bigger picture.

"This is about much more than war," said Patrick Reinsborough, an organizer with Direct Action Against the War. "This is about uprooting the system that creates war."

Reinsborough's umbrella group coordinated civil disobedience protests that tied up San Francisco's Financial District the day after the war started and Monday at the Port of Oakland. Both were designed to show how U.S. corporate interests are shaping the nation's foreign policy.

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